Benjamin P. Bower, Denver; Jan. 8, 1932; three in prison for six and one-half years.
James DeJute, Niles, Ohio; March 2, 1932; two in prison for life.
Haskell Bohn, St. Paul; June 30, 1932; suspect awaiting trial.
Jackie Russell, Brooklyn; Sept. 30, 1932; two in prison for four to twenty-five years.
Mr. and Mrs. Max Gecht, Chicago; Dec. 10, 1932, two in prison for life.
Ernest Schoening, Pleasantville, N.J.; Dec. 27, 1932; five in prison for five to twenty years.
Charles Boettcher Jr., Denver; Feb. 12, 1933; two in prison for twenty-six and sixteen years.
John Factor, Chicago; April 12, 1933; two suspects held.
Peggy McMath, Harwichport, Mass.; May 2, 1933; kidnapper in prison for twenty-four years.
Mary McElroy, Kansas City; May 27, 1933; two held; two more sought.
John King Ottley, Atlanta, Ga.; July 5, 1933; guard arrested.
August Luer, Alton, Ill.; July 10, 1933; four men and two women under arrest, after confession by one of the men.2
What spawned the kidnapping epidemic? Prohibition, which was ostensibly intended to eradicate domestic violence, workplace injuries, and other social ills associated with drunkenness, has been blamed not just for creating a vast new liquor-supply business for organized crime but for fostering, even glamorizing, a general spirit of lawlessness. But it can also be argued that the approaching end of Prohibition contributed to the spate of kidnappings. After all, what was an honest bootlegger or rumrunner to do when his trade became obsolete?***
Or perhaps something much deeper was going on. For all the talk about economic inequality in twenty-first century America, the chasm between rich and poor was far wider in the 1930s. A man was lucky to have a job, any job, while less fortunate men were standing in bread lines and housewives were serving ketchup sandwiches for dinner and boiling bones to make thin soup.
And if a person was born to wealth, he or she might be hated by those on the bottom rung of society. Almost surely, some kidnapping victims suffered because they had what their abductors could never have: money and self-esteem. And freedom from worry, perhaps that above all. Nowadays, people know that recessions come and go, that prosperity will return as surely as the seasons will change. But in the Great Depression, that kind of optimism, that certainty, was inconceivable to many people.
Travel back in time via newspaper microfilm to the 1930s, and you sense the fear and sorrow and violence of those years. In the depths of the Depression, bank robbers roamed the country. They were new Robin Hoods to some Americans, especially those who lost their savings when banks failed or were terrified of losing their homes or farms to foreclosure.
To read the news from that time is to sense that the very fabric of American society was being torn apart. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” delivered at his first inauguration in 1933, offered a flicker of hope to a people in need of hope. It just wasn’t true.
“Every day, the children seemed to grow more pale and thin,” an impoverished Chicago city street sweeper said a few weeks after FDR took office. “I was working only four days a week and had received no pay for months.”****
The street sweeper was explaining to the police why he fed his starving family meat from a dead pig he had found in an alley behind a restaurant. He sampled the meat, and it didn’t seem to harm him. So his wife and their ten children also ate. Soon, two of his children died of food poisoning. Within days, two more of the children were dead. When the street sweeper told his story, he was said to be gravely ill, as were his wife and some of their remaining children. I wanted to know if the mother and father and their children survived, but I could not find out. Not long after the initial reports, the newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere seemed to tire of the family’s ordeal. Or perhaps the journalists simply lost track; the family was Italian, and the name was spelled at least two ways in the coverage.
Besides, the Great Depression offered countless stories of suffering and death. No need to dwell on the troubles of a lowly street sweeper and his family, not when some broken men were committing suicide and others were abandoning their families and hopping freight trains to nowhere.
Not all kidnappings stirred public revulsion. On the contrary, a juicy gangland kidnapping could be as entertaining as a newspaper photo of a slain mobster with his head resting in a bowl of pasta and his blood mingling with spilled wine.
Newspaper reporters and editors indulged in considerable levity as they chronicled the snatches and ransom negotiations involving people on the wrong side of the law. Even the New York Times, that stuffy bastion of good taste and prudery, got into the spirit now and then. Reporting on one case in the thirties, the Times noted lightheartedly that Basil Banghart, a Chicago gangster and machine-gun artist known to friend and foe as “the Owl,” had been sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for his role in a kidnapping. (A fellow mobster explained Banghart’s nickname: “He had big, slow-blinking eyes—and he was wise.”)3
Around the same time, the newspaper noted breezily, another Windy City miscreant, Charles “Ice Wagon” Connors, was kidnapped and “taken for a ride” to a patch of woods where he was shot to death by former associates after a falling out—over money, of all things. (In mob legend, Connors acquired his nickname as a good-natured joke: a getaway car he was driving collided with an ice-delivery truck after a robbery. The historical record is unclear as to whether he got away anyhow.)
The laughter stopped on the night of March 1, 1932, with the most famous kidnapping in U.S. history, that of twenty-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., stolen from his parents’ home in Hopewell
